#Carve December

Julie Balzer - from whom I recently took a stamp carving class - announced on her blog last week that she was going to carve a stamp a day for the month of December (you can read that post here).  I have decided to play along with this daily art project.  I especially liked the fact that she said, "If you miss some days, who cares?!"  Because, you know, it could happen.  :)

I was going to start easy by carving a small, simple design or maybe the word "December" or the number one for December 1st but then I drew this little face at work today and thought, hey, why not carve it into a stamp?

I was a little nervous getting started and had to tell myself to just start and do it. What was the worst that could happen?  If it didn't turn out, I could throw out that piece of rubber and carve something else.

I followed the directions in the beginning of Julie's book, entitled "Carve Stamp Play":

and it was easy peasy. I took my time and went slow. It took me about half an hour and it was quite relaxing and meditative.  You can see the sequence from right to left in the images below.

First I carved the outline and stamped the image to see what it looked like.  I was intending to carve out all the blank spaces and just leave the outline but I liked the way it looked with the solid black areas so I decided to leave it like that. But I decided she needed more lines in her hair.  I liked the frame around her face but decided to carve away the excess, as Julie recommends doing so in order to make it easy to place the stamp exactly where you want it.  Seems like a good idea to me!

I'm quite pleased with how this first stamp turned out and I'm looking forward to working through the rest of Julie's book as the month progresses and trying out the various techniques she has included. There are so many good ideas in her book and I know I'll have lots of fun trying them out.

Feel free to jump in and join us!  We're posting photos of our creations on Instagram under the hashtag #carvedecember.